Border Town

Your farm is completely surrounded by a foreign country because the king lost it in a game of cards. You live in Cooch Behar.

You are eating at a café when you are informed that it must close. If you’ll just shift to a table in the other country, service is still available. This café is in Baarle/Hertog.

You work in the mayor’s office. Down the hall is a parallel mayor’s office with a whole mirror set of city officials to govern the other half of your city. You work in Texarkana.

We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity.

Border Town is a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that will investigate the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it.

In any case, Border Town promises to be an interesting experience for all involved—and I should add that it’s great to see people putting together this kind of independent educational workshop outside of the university system. If you end up being one of the participants, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Nice. as a current angeleno (you, not me), I'd be interested in your take on Southern California's situation re border towns. Been working through Mike Davis' stuff, who you keep good tabs on it seems. In magical urbanism he claims that each frontier/border situations is utterly exceptional and unique, which suggests comparisons will be difficult. Possibly interesting, possibly a failure. I like it.

Faslanyc, I've written a bit about border tunnels as emergent border condition, vis-a-vis Subtopia and things like that, but I have not actually spent much time near the border (at least in a direct, geographical sense). I'll have to remedy that someday…

Another for the list: Twin Rivers Paper Company, one of the few truely international companies. One half of the paper mill sits on the Canadian side of the border, the other half on the USA side.http://www.twinriverspaper.com